Ted Hughes

The English poet Ted Hughes was Sylvia's husband from 1956 till her death in 1963, they lived together until
autumn 1962. Shortly before his death he published a collection of poems remembering his first wife and their life together,
Birthday Letters ,
published by Faber and Faber in England, by Farrar Straus & Giroux in the U.S.
It contains 88 poems that cover his life with and without Sylvia,
all poems were written after her death, some were already published elsewhere as early as the 1980s but went largely unnoticed.
This collection has meanwhile become one of Hughes' most famous and best loved books.
You can order the book online at amazon.com:Birthday Letters, hardcoverBirthday Letters, paperback
or at amazon.co.ukBirthday Letters, hardcoverBirthday Letters, paperback

Recently, the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes have been published, containing more or less all his published poetry, including the very rare editions
Howls and Whispers and Cappriccios with poems about Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill respectively. The poems in Howls and Whispers are similar to
the Birthday Letters poems but somewhat more personal and private. This book offers an opportunity to get all of Hughes' poetry, including poems that only appeared
in magazines and newspapers but were not included in previous collections. Highly recommended!

Ted Hughes died of cancer on 28th October 1998 at age 68.
A comprehensive Ted Huges website can be found at
http://www.ted-hughes.net (maintained by Claas Kazzer).

In this insightful biography, the first written since Hughes's death, Elaine Feinstein explores an altogether more complex situation,
throwing new light on his relationship with his lover Assia Wevill, who later killed herself along with their young daughter. --Synopsis
Unfortunately, the book does not hold what it promises in its title, it concentrates more on the life than on the poet and fails
to shed light on how his life influenced his writing. --Anja Beckmann

The first collection of short fiction by Ted Hughes. Taken from 40 years of occasional story writing, the
amazing descriptive powers and preoccupation with themes of violence, estrangement, and arduous testing for which
Ted Hughes's poetry is celebrated across the world are vividly present in every tale .

The fourteenth collection from England's Poet Laureate, containing several characteristic poems, in which nature is
presented with striking exactitude, unclouded by sentiment. But Hughes breaks new ground with a number of intimate
poems that memorialize members of his family as they were in his youth.

England's poet laureate Ted Hughes first turned his hand to Ovid's Metamorphoses when he--along with other prominent
English-language poets such as Seamus Heaney, Amy Clampitt, and Charles Simic--contributed poems to the anthology
After Ovid. In the three years following After Ovid's publication, Hughes continued working with the Metamorphoses,
eventually completing the 24 translations collected here. Culling from 250 original tales, Hughes has chosen some of the
most violent and disturbing narratives Ovid wrote, including the stories of Echo and Narcissus, Bacchus and Pentheus,
and Semele's rape by Jove. Classical purists may be offended at the occasional liberties Hughes takes with Ovid's words,
but no one will quarrel with the force and originality of Hughes's verse, or with its narrative skill. This translation is an
unusual triumph--a work informed by the passion and wit of Ovid, yet suffused with Hughes's own distinctive poetic
sensibility.

His vigorous, fluid poetry is drama itself and demands to be spoken aloud. Tim Supple and Simon Reade take ten of the
tales --including the stories of Echo and Narcissus, of Venus and Adonis, of Pyramus and Thisbe, among others--and
transform them into elegant works for the stage. Erotic, violent, and magical, this dramatization of Tales from Ovid realizes
the immense power of Hughes's original text, which Michael Hofmann celebrated in The Times (London) as "one of the
great works of the century."

When earth needs a hero to battle the fearsome dragon-bat from outer space, its unlikely hero is the Iron Giant. The
30th anniversary edition of this children's classic precedes a full-length animated feature film from Warner Brothers.

Great selection of Hughes' poetry drawing from all previously published volumes but also including poems on Sylvia Plath later collected in Birthday Letters
and uncollected poems on Assia Gutmann (otherwise only available in a very limited edition) and his family.

When "Remains of Elmet", "Cave Birds" and "River" were first published, the weight of each collection tended to be
overlooked in favour of other considerations. This book shows the coherence and poetic strength of each sequence and
its relationship to the larger output. Cave Birds is not otherwise available as it is out of print.

Written while he ran a farm together with his seconod wife Carol, in Devon, impressions and descriptions of rural life and animals.
A new edition of Hughes' acclaimed Devon farming sequence with an introduction sketching the background to the
poems.

Fay Godwin is commonly regarded as this country's finest landscape photographer. Ted Hughes, who was born and
brought up in the part of the world she has captured in these atmospheric studies, was inspired by them to provide a
verse text, one of the most personal things he has written.

Penguin Audiobooks 1997, read by Ted HughesBuy this tape online at amazon.co.uk
A collection of poems focusing on the central figure of the crow, predatory, mocking and indestructible. "Crow" is read
here by the author in its entirety and with narrative links not included in the published text.

Crow is black as "the wet otter's head"; Crow is "trembling featherless elbows in the nest's filth"; Crow eats, plays, kills,
flies to the sun, recites theology, tests mythology, falls in love. In Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, Ted
Hughes tales a look at life from a crow's-eye view and finds it nasty and brutish. The vivid, harsh language matches the
tenor of Crow's days. "When the eagle soared clear through a dawn distilling of emerald …Crow spraddled head-down in
the beach-garbage, guzzling a dropped ice-cream"; "Crow thought of a wage--And it choked him, it was cut unspoiled
from his dead stomach."
Former laureate Hughes dedicated this volume (first published in 1972) to the memory of Shura and Assia, his daughter
and ex-lover who committed suicide, as had Hughes' wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, and it's hard to read these poems
without remembering the violence of Hughes' own experience. Women are predators and victims and they die bloody
deaths. In "Crow's Account of St. George" a wife and children are brutally murdered; in "Lovesong" a lover's laughs are
"an assassin's attempts". Most interesting are the poems that rewrite myth--God trying to teach Crow love, Crow flying
into the sun, Crow looking for language to name his world. Crow is jarringly familiar as Adam, Icarus, Oedipus and the
Devil all at once in this bleak and resonant collection. - -Tamsin Todd

A collection of prose pieces by the Poet Laureate, on literary matters and on writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, Walter de la Mare, T.S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath. Hughes also expresses concerns about
education, the environment, and the arts in general.

A collection of short fiction by the Poet Laureate, taken from 40 years of occasional story-writing. The nine pieces, some
of which appeared among the poems in "Wodwo", incorporate themes of violence, estrangement and arduous testing.
Ted Hughes once confessed that most of his short fiction was merely "an accompaniment to my poems." But there are
many gems here, including the affecting trilogy portraying the poet's South Yorkshire childhood. The finest tale in this
collection may be "The Wound," actually a radio play about a dying soldier trekking across a pitiless desert. The
death-march transforms itself into an allegory of the Buddhist path from death to rebirth. Most of these short stories date
from the 1950s and 60s, before Hughes became a famous poet.

The following books are stories for children yet they can be enjoyed by adults, especially in the context of his poetry as in Crow or Cave Birds. These stories feature
the same clay-baking, slightly confused god that figures in Crow, they sparkle with imagination and humour.

First published 25 years ago, this book by the Poet Laureate is now regarded as a classic of its kind. It includes 11
stories of what happened to a number of animals, including the owl, whale, polar bear, and the donkey who wanted to be
a lionocerangoutangading.

In this collection of tales from the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, God appears as an artist who is sometimes surprised by
his creatures. He puts an awful lot of care into fashioning the birds, whereas he simply pulls Newt out of the ground.

Following "How the Whale Became" and "Tales of Early World", this third volume contains ten further Creation Tales.
Sophisticated storytelling and an irresistible energy combine in this collection, full of dark comedy.Beautiful and imaginative tales

A clanking iron giant topples from a cliff and lies smashed on the rocks below. Then, his various parts begin to stir and
reach out for one another. The Iron Man is ready to walk again - and he is very hungry. Mankind must put a stop to the dreadful destruction by the Iron Man and set a trap for him, but he cannot be kept down.
Then, when a terrible monster from outer space threatens to lay waste to the planet, it is the Iron Man who finds a way to
save the world.

The Iron Woman has come to take revenge on mankind for its thoughtless polluting of the seas, rivers and lakes. Her first
target for destruction is the waste-disposal factory where Lucy's dad and most of the men in the town are employed.

These poems explore the strange and wonderful "moon-world". The terrain is fantastic, its creatures both intriguing and grotesque, but
all is touched by Hughes' moon magic. Beautifully illustrated.
recommended reading:

A work first published in 1948 in which Graves argues that the language of poetic myth current in the Mediterranean and
Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or
Muse - some dating from the Old Stone Age.
This book influenced both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath considerably.